AI and Democratic Education: A Critical Pragmatist Assessment

This is a presentation for a talk that I delivered at the ESDiT and 4TU.Ethics conference Rethinking Ethics – Reimagining Technology at the University of Twente on 2 October 2024. In this paper, I draw on pragmatist philosophy to assess the impact of educational AI (AIED) on the democratic dimension of education. AIED is expected to facilitate teaching and learning by personalizing content to the needs of students, automating parts of teachers’ jobs, and monitoring students’ performance and behavior, among others. However, I argue that we should pay close attention to AIED’s impact on the social development of students and the civic values and attitudes it is going to promote. First, AIED employs questionable pedagogies by primarily framing learning as acquisition of knowledge and reducing good teaching to efficient delivery of the material. This runs contrary to the pragmatist emphasis on students’ practical engagement with the social environment which allows them to cooperatively address shared needs and perform social roles alongside others. I argue that AIED positions students as passive receivers of wisdom rather than active (future) citizens. Second, AIED companies portray group instruction as inefficient and promote a vision in which every student has their own personal tutor (e.g., Khanmigo from Khan Academy). I argue that AIED downplays the social dimension of learning and risks depriving students of opportunities to learn how to live alongside others while getting accustomed to social differences (e.g., by observing peers from different backgrounds struggle and excel at different tasks). Third, it is likely that the use of AIED delegate much of the instruction to technology and place the teacher in a supporting or orchestrating. However, teachers do much more than transmitting knowledge, as they develop significant relationships with their students, provide advice or care for students’ emotional needs. Most importantly for this paper, they serve as role models and an example of socially engaged citizens – a function that cannot be adequately replaced by AI. Finally, the increased reliance on privately-owned and managed AIED subjects education to profit-seeking and increases control large tech companies have over public schools. How do we ensure that the interests and wellbeing of students are prioritized over profits and that teachers, parents and students have their say in how and why AIED is used?